Review of The Painted Bird (2020)

 Polished Depravity

“Three major evils - the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war. These are the 3 things I want to deal with today.”

― MLK, opening of speech at Butler Street YMCA, the year before his death

“Demand me nothing. What you know you know. From this time forth I never will speak word”

― Iago, when Othello asks him why he committed such evil acts

“Look down on me and you see a fool, look up at me and you see a god, look straight at me and you see yourself”

― Charles Manson

Note: This Essay Discusses Topics Readers Might Find Offensive & Is Illustrated With Photos Some Might Find Objectionable

Vaclav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird, is based on the semi-autobiographical book by Jerzy Kosinski. It explores the darkest corners of the human soul with the exacting eye of a fashion photographer. There is an off-putting beauty to the rich black and white images that illustrate the horrifying journey of Joska. This Jewish orphan wanders the World War II landscape of Eastern Europe. The Nazis are the least of his problems. The peasantry and the warring armies give him the same standing as a runaway slave in the antebellum South.  Within the first five minutes of the film our hero is set upon by a gang of antisemites. They take his beloved pet ferret and spear it to the ground while lighting it ablaze. This occurred after kicking-in the boy’s teeth. This type of unspeakable cruelty sets the stage for the next 2 3/4 hours. It is a gruesome journey but Marhoul manages the unthinkable. In unmasking our inhumanity he becomes tethered by polite artistic convention. This is the well-made-play of brutality. Sadly this undercuts the power of the narrative. Strangely, it might be just what Mr. Kosinski wanted in a film adaptation of his work. 

Marhoul is precise, to a fault. No one could ask for a more beautifully shot, wonderfully performed, and carefully crafted work. The setting is a paradise. The current back-to-the-land boosters would swoon at the series of exquisitely primitive villages. Any connoisseur of acting would marvel at the sensitivity and subtly of the performances. The black and white images glisten with the brilliance of a Sebastiao Salgado landscape portrait. Despite the shine, or maybe because of it, the narrative falls flat. Ironically Marhoul is guilty of being tepid. This is a story about the unpalatable but the director is mindful of the unwatchable. Artists always wrestle with boundaries that balance their vision with the needs of backers who finance the endeavor. This director threads the needle in favor of mainstream arthouse sensitivity. Pasolini’s Salo vividly shows us orphan children being forced to eat excrement after being raped. That film is still banned in many countries. Marhoul is in interested in “succes de scandale” over real scandal.  This creates a bizarre form of censorship. The homosexual attack on a child appears behind closed doors while the cuckold rips out his rival’s eyes in full view. The old women (Joska’s grandmother) is never fully naked, but there is an almost complete reveal of the young woman having sex with the goat.  Pubic hair is verboten yet the grisly torture of animals is highlighted. The results gives non-human deaths more resonance as they are unfiltered and genuine. We feel Joska’s pain when he mourns the poor bird. The boy’s discovery of his mentor evokes less passion, even as he clutches to the old man’s legs as he hangs from the barn rafter.  It is understandable because many of the humans are so inhumane. The kindly bird-man laughs as the little creature is cannibalized by a hungry flock. He purposely painted the wings with seed to start the horrific frenzy.  Another significant mentor, the Soviet sharp-shooter, showcases an equally bipolar sense of good and evil.

Villagers murder some of the sniper’s comrades, so he plans retribution. He executes three adults and a child. The youngest is the same age as Joska, who witnesses the entire spectacle. The mentor turns to his young charge and says, “Remember this: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.  This goy, godless communist army officer quotes the Hebrew bible to the young Jewish orphan. Irony is spread throughout the film. Humanity rears its head in strange ways.  The Nazi SS soldier refuses to murder the young boy and lets him flee into the forest. The country shaman cures Joska of his fever in a bizarre ritual that could easily be mistaken for a barbaric execution. She shoos away the crows just as they pick away at his skull while he is buried up to his neck. What constitutes this odd group of rescuers/tormentors? The Painted Bird is their story, not Joska’s. They shape him and he takes them into the future. 

The film is divided into a series of chapters, each with a black card that names the next stranger who takes charge of the boy. It is the spiritual cousin to three film that feature orphans maneuvering deadly landscapes. Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, about an English child stranded at the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war. It has a similar plot, but the orphan is more clearly delineated. Unlike the mute Joska, he has more agency over his surroundings.  Isao Takahata’s Grave of The Fireflies follows the travails of a young brother and sister in war ravaged Japan during WW II. This film has a distinctly spiritual bend that suggests a triumph of goodness in the end.  Varda’s With Neither Shelter Nor Law is the most closely related to the Marhoul/Konsinski’s vision. It features a transient young woman 1990s France who is a silent foil.  Her self-imposed exile from middle class normalcy exposes the hard truths of a seemingly civil society. She doesn’t experience the hell of a war-torn country with ubiquitous anti-semitism. Nevertheless the innocent shows a general state of unkindness. She is scarred by the endless oppression. Joska shares this pain. The whimsical grandchild playing with animals in the woods morphs into a stone-faced adult capable of the cruelty exhibited by his mentors. There is always strange unanswered questions regarding the tormentors. What makes the grandmother austere? What makes the shaman heartless?  How could the miller be so barbaric? Why is the lover so cruel…. the villagers so demonic? Why are the families being slaughtered as they escape the train? Why is the soldier, a caring beloved mentor, so willing to murder a boy Joska’s age? Hate is ubiquitous. Joska has learned by Christian example and may better the instruction. In the closing moments of the film he he writes his name in the fog of the window. This hints that not all of his humanity has been snuffed out. Interestingly his action is triggered by seeing the father’s concentration camp tattoo. It certifies, in the boy’s mind, the father’s legitimacy. There are twinned by enduring the unspeakable.  Oddly the denouement falls flat. Instead of heartbreak there is, simply, relief. This stylized romp through a made-man hell-scape is coming to a, somewhat hopeful, climax. The end result is cold and unsatisfying. Perhaps this is due to a paradoxical flaw in Konsinski’s vision. He is at home with characters enacting carnage but never delves into why they picked-up the ax.  The former can be capivating, but the later is more interesting. 

The The Painted Bird is a strange coda to a whirlwind life. A impoverished Jewish child with a fake identity becomes an alter boy, army sharpshooter, truck driver, academic, member of the literati, Lothario, man-about-town… lonely suicide victim. But make no mistake Jasko’s spiritual father made his mark. The slick, multi-million dollar film is proof. It oddly dovetails with a life of dogged perseverance. After establishing himself as an academic in Poland he set his sights on America. He forged letters and was sponsored by a bogus educational foundation.  He married the daughter of a steel-magnate within a few years of his arrival. He landed real awards and accolades (Guggenheim Fellow, Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters…). This was a springboard to literary success, celebrity, scandal….. and premature death. Many feel his demise, a grisly suicide involving suffocation, was the result of direct criticism of the veracity of his work. In his defense he said The Painted Bird was not an autobiography:  “I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes”. It is interesting to note that the author J. G. Ballard took the same artistic liberties with his semi-autographical book Empire of the Sun, but avoided being chastised as a fraud. The comparison between the two authors is interesting in another respect: Ballard used his work to conquer his demons. Konsinki’s childhood was a calling-card to polite society. Konsinki was more “wild and crazy guy” than the witness to one of humanities darkest chapters. This is not to discredit him or make light of the real horror he endured. Kosinski, born an outcast, felt drawn to being a friend of those in charge. It’s not that he didn’t suffer. It’s just that his was a battle for legitimacy. Whereas Pasonli was literally tortured and murdered for offending the ruling class with Salo, Kosinki wished to be the Enfant-terrible of those in power. In this light Marhoul’s film adaptation is very much in sync with the author’s wish to be… just controversial enough…. without slipping into the abyss of being a true radical. Perhaps Marhoul understood that behind the horror of Kosinski’s parable was a strange desire to remain in the realm of the temporal, which has no need of saints or martyrs.

Marhoul forgets the inspiration of Varda’s heroine, whose journey strikes the heart, not the gut. She abandoned the stable middle class life to be a self-made refugee. She meets the sad fate of freezing to death in a ditch. I can’t help watching it and thinking of Kosinski’s final breaths. Their strident individualism would not bend to the lull of conventional society. They chose to exit. Many nefarious zealots choose the mirror strategy: kill those who do not conform to their way. Marhoul’s Painted Bird is an exquisite rendering of this phenomena. Unfortunately by ignoring the motivations behind the evil angels of our nature we are left with mere action. Even Pasolini’s monstrous work has heart. Marhoul has polish.It is ironic that this story of depravity and inhumanity would be Kosinki’s ticket to rubbing elbows with respectable society. 

Someone told me a story of the author in his prime attending an evening bonfire party in the fashionable town of East Hampton New York. Kosinski watched and then disappeared to fetch something out of the truck of his car. It was a strange contraption that had a metal holder on one end with a rope on the other. He filled the container with hot charcoals. He swung the rope and sparks flew as he launched the container into the night sky. The crowd, filled with the literati, was wowed by this different sort of painted bird that brilliantly flashed through the darkness.  Kosinski impressed a certain, well-placed audience. Marhoul’s work is more burnish to the Kosinski’s dashing career. But it brings with it a disquieting sense of dread when you consider the author’s fate.

Perhaps J.G. Ballard took a better path in processing a childhood in hell. His books were banned and he generated controversy… and yet: He died in old age after raising a family and producing a vast body of dystopian fiction. Kosinski’s only managed three books before his suicide in midlife. He was a performance artist at heart. In the end Jasko’s spiritual father found a kind of success, but the demons never left. The world was always against Kosinski… even when it wasn’t.  The ghosts of The Painted Bird always remained. Knowing this; Marhoul’s horror doesn’t remain on the screen. It goes home with you.